Corporate governance in Canadian Federal Crown Corporations

The corporate governance of Crown Corporations first became a topic of common discussion in 2003 with the Sponsorship scandal whereby Government institutions were implicated in failing to respect the parliamentary appropriations process and in failing to comply with Government contracting policies and regulations leading to a misuse of public funds. As a result, in 2005 the Government announced thirty-one measures Crown Corporations were required to implement to improve their governance and alleviate citizens concerns. This paper is a comprehensive analysis of the implementation of these thirty-one measures in all forty-six Federal Crown Corporations. Since the definitions of some of the measures the Government announced are unclear, rendering their measurement problematical, this paper both defines and clarifies the definitions of the thirty-one measures. Given that these measures were announced five years prior to this study, it could reasonably be expected that all Crown Corporations would by now have implemented all of them and felt obliged to report on their implementation. This paper demonstrates that this is not the case. There is a wide range of disparity on the number of measures implemented, ranging from one Crown Corporation implementing all of the measures to two Crown Corporations implementing only three of them